Miniature Monday 55

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Miniature Monday, coming to you live from some remote corner of France (with snow!). I am of course thrilled to be publishing this on time, according to my entirely self-imposed schedule, so let’s dive straight in!

I am happy to report that, work pressure notwithstanding, my hobby has been plentiful this week. The reason for that is entirely that my daughter is still incredibly into the W’adrhun (my orcs for Conquest) so she has been sitting at the painting table with me, basically doubling my hobby time for the week. She’s also asked to get something cool to paint for herself -apparently the old Wraithlord and Falcon grav-tank didn’t quite cut it anymore. So I have been priming toy dinosaurs for her to paint, and it’s been a resounding success.

Coming to my own hobby. First of all I have finished painting my first (minimum size) unit for Conquest, notably the Blooded. It’s been a real pleasure to paint these guys with a proper “army painter” mindset. The bigger size make the whole process very relaxing.

It’s also been a nice trip of experimentation for leathers (so, browns) and green-skin. I kept changing the mix of colours I was using since I feel that perfect consistency is not something one should expect from a bunch of orcs -even nice-ish (but very hungry), equality-minded, matriarchal ones.

While the scheme is, as I said, very basic, I also had fun experimenting with the warpaints, applying them in the same colour (red, cause they’re the Blooded right?) but in different patterns. One thing I wanted to mix-up a bit going forward are the actual stands, adding a bit of decorations. You can see some cacti (cactuses?) I have bought for this in the first picture.

As I had a game planned for Saturday (which actually happened, I’ll come back to this in the next section) I also painted a couple more things even more quickly. First, a unit of baby-dinosaurs (a Hunting Pack). Disclaimer: rules-as-written these should be 6 to a stand, but I went for 3 to make them less crowded and possible to paint after gluing + making two units out of the starter. I have 6 more sitting around in case I really need to respect some sort of tournament standard but that’s so far in the future that it wasn’t worth considering at the moment.

Also, I didn’t quite like the empty spots in the character stands. In theory, these are to put Retinues on but a) my characters didn’t have any in my army list and b) miniatures for this aren’t even produced for now, so I decided to create some fillers to decorate the stand and fill the spots. Here’s the results:

These come from the abovementioned cacti as well as from a box of resin “terrain” (not really terrain, more like, items) that I got from my wife for Christmas -a lovely gift and a smart one at that, of course, cause it’s always useful without having to nail the exact miniatures I need.

Then the game happened! Saturday night I met with a clubmate to play our first game of Conquest. It was also the general introduction of Conquest at the club, with another game being played in the afternoon by two other clubmates. We played 1000 points, I had my W’adrhun (including an unpainted and yet to be revealed big beast) and my opponent had his Dweghorns (fiery dwarves).

While of course we have surely forgotten rules, gotten stuff wrong and so on, the game felt amazing. Smooth, fast, and brutal, we stopped the first game after 6 rounds (one side having been almost tabled) and we decided to immediately start a second game since we still had a lot of time -we stopped the seecond game again after 5 to 6 rounds since again one side had very little left.

The absence of deployment (check out Conquest if you’re wondering how that works) and the alternate activations make the game have a spectacular rythm and 0 downtime -which is something incredibly appealing to me in this moment of my life. So, I am even more happy of having invested in this new project. We’ll be playing again on 3 February and, even better, two more clubmates decided to pick up the game after watching the games.

And that’s it, Conquest is looking hot in this start of 2024. Still, I will be juggling between the two projects since I now have a game of Old-World-discovery in two weeks and I want to get my Winter Court army built and on movement trays before that. Check this space next Monday (or, Tuesday because who knows) to see the results.